If you are a Camino user, and you've encountered WMV video or audio online in
the past couple of years, you've probably seen pages inexplicably scramble
themselves as you scroll, type, or select text (although you probably didn't
realize that it was because of WMV content in another window or tab). This is
due to an old bug in Telestream's Flip4Mac plugin which, since it's a
third-party plugin, we rely on them to fix.

Six months ago, I had the opportunity to talk to a Telestream engineer about
this issue. To make sure I could describe the problem as accurately as possible
I spent about an hour testing pages with WMV content and looking at what exactly
happened to other tabs and windows (that was the first time I'd personally
looked into it, since I knew that others involved with Camino had talked to
Telestream and been told that it was being investigated at their end). After
that hour, without looking at any code or having any special knowledge beyond a
basic understanding of how plugin drawing works on the Mac, it was clear how
they were corrupting the graphics context: the plugin was changing the location
of (0, 0) out from under us.

I had assumed that they already knew this, and that the problem was figuring
out how to fix it, but as it turned out, the step from knowing that to finding
and fixing the bug in the Flip4Mac plugin was tiny. So I found myself wondering:
if it took me an hour to do essentially all of the work necessary to get this
bug fixed, just by looking at the behavior, how much time could
Telestream—with access not only to their code, but to the specific changes
that they made in the version that first introduced this bug—have put into
investigating in the year and a half since we had been assured that they would
look into it?

If it were just that, I would write it off to a communication failure and
think nothing more of it. Perhaps it was never made clear to them just how
severe the problems this bug caused were, and certainly we should have followed
up with them regularly to ensure that the bug didn't fall though the cracks by
accident. The important thing was that now they had a fix in hand, and they
understood the severity of the issue, so surely a fixed version would be
available soon.

But here we are, six months and two releases of Flip4Mac later, without a
fix. I was disappointed that the 2.2.0.49 release at the end of December didn't
have the fix, but not too surprised; there's a whole release cycle to go through
to get fixes out to users, and a month-long cycle isn't at all
unreasonable—although it certainly suggested that they didn't take this
issue as seriously as we do (if somehow Camino were making the entire system
unusable for 2% of our users every time they launched it, and we had a fix, we'd
risk slipping a release slightly to get it in, without hesitation). We followed
up, just to reiterate that we viewed the fix as critical, and why: that it was
not only damaging the WMV experience for hundreds of thousands of their users,
but that it also crippled the entire browser for those affected,
creating widespread problems for users, and offloading the large support burden
of their bug onto us. We made it clear that this was by far our most frequently
reported bug. We've made these points to them a number of times over the past
six months.

Earlier this week, there was a new Flip4Mac release (variously labeled in the
download as 2.2.0.49A, 2.2.0.49R, and, confusingly enough, just 2.2.0.49 again),
the second since they have had a fix. It didn't include any release notes (the
release notes they link to are the original 2.2.0.49 notes), so we don't know
what they did fix, but it definitely didn't include the Camino issue.

A release process where an important fix takes more than six months to get
into a release isn't plausible, so the only possible conclusion I can reach is
that Telestream's management has made the explicit decision that fixing a
problem that affects every single Camino user using their product isn't even
moderately important: not important enough to slip into a release that was
winding down, not important enough to get its own tiny bug-fix release in a span
of five months, and not even important enough to put into a release that could
not realistically have been assembled until well after they had this fix. So
users continue to suffer, and we continue to shoulder the support burden and the
negative publicity of their bug, because they apparently don't think that Camino
matters.

Since Telestream is choosing not to fix the bug, I'm releasing a stop-gap
fix: this tool will modify the released version
of the Flip4Mac plugin to remove the problematic code, so that it will no longer
corrupt drawing throughout Camino. I can't easily make any complex changes, so
unlike a real fix to this bug it won't be selectively applied to Camino; as a
result, WMV content may behave differently in Firefox once you run it (Safari
uses a different plugin, so should not be affected in any way).

Hopefully, Telestream will reconsider the importance of this bug, and the
workaround won't be necessary for long.